Acoma Sky City Pueblo

If you could take just one photo: Sky City's narrow, winding streets

Our guide wore a bright scarf, a wide smile and an infectious pride in her home. An ancient adobe village perched atop a 367 foot tall, sun-baked mesa, Sky City is part of the Acoma Pueblo tribe, the oldest continually inhabited settlement in the United States. “The Acomas were matriarchal,” she explained. “Even now, all these properties,” she gestured to the rows of adobe-walled cubes, against some of which leaned the tall ladders which were in ancient times the only means of entrance, “are traditionally owned by the women of the pueblo. So when my auntie calls me—she lives on the corner there—I answer!” With no electricity, no plumbing, and little relief from the mid-day sun, but with massive outdoor clay ovens, intricately painted black and white pottery, and a woman (our guide’s aunt’s neighbor) selling fresh-made fry bread, Sky City could not be more welcoming, nor more fascinating.

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A weathered sign near Albuquerque beckons “Visit Acoma, America’s Oldest City,” Irresistibly pulled down a deserted, dusty road, the sort leaving you wondering “Have I enough gas?” or “Did I miss a turn?” Acoma appears: impossibly perched on a monumental mesa, seemingly plopped down from outer space. Foothold-only access repelled marauders from 700 AD until Coronado arrived in1540. Disappointed, he reputedly mistook this for one of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold, due to glinting window “glass,” mica. Fourteen clans bring all the town's water up the 1929-era road that Paramount built for filming Wing Foot to electricity-less adobes, passed mother to youngest daughter. Those who take this detour witness Acoma’s enigma: a sacred, yet modern respect for natural resources.

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